The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

      It was perhaps inevitable that many of the officers here, especially the older ones, would react to Jammu’s appointment with skepticism. But attitudes have already begun to change. The sentiment most often voiced in the precinct houses these days seems to be: “She’s OK.”

      Five minutes into Joseph Feig’s interview, Jammu had smelled sweat from her underarms, a mildewy feral stink. Feig had a nose; he didn’t need a polygraph.

      “Isn’t Jammu the name of a city in Kashmir?” he asked.

      “It’s the capital during the winter.”

      “I see.” He looked at her fixedly for several long seconds. Then he asked: “What’s it like switching countries like this in the middle of your life?”

      “I’m terribly patriotic,” she said, with a smile. She was surprised he hadn’t pursued the question of her past. These profiles were a rite of passage in St. Louis, and Feig, a senior editor, was generally acknowledged to be the dean of local feature writing. When he first walked in the door, in his wrinkled tweed jacket and his week-old beard, fierce and gray, he’d looked so investigative that Jammu had actually blushed. She’d imagined the worst:

      FEIG: Colonel Jammu, you claim you wanted to escape the violence of Indian society, the personal and caste conflicts, but the fact remains that you did spend fifteen years in the leadership of a force whose brutality is notorious. We aren’t stupid, Colonel. We’ve heard about India. The hammered elbows, the tooth extractions, the rifle rapes. The candles, the acid, the lathis, the cattle prods—

      JAMMU: The mess was generally cleaned up before I got there.

      FEIG: Colonel Jammu, given Mrs. Gandhi’s almost obsessive distrust of her subordinates and given your own central involvement in Project Poori, I have to wonder if you’re at all related to the Prime Minister. I don’t see how else a woman could have made commissioner, especially a woman with an American father—

      JAMMU: It isn’t clear to me what difference it makes to St. Louis if I’m related to certain people in India.

      But the article was in print now, definitive and unretractable. The windows of Jammu’s office were beginning to fill with light. She rested her chin on her hands and let the print below her wander out of focus. She was happy with the article but worried about Feig. How could someone so obviously intelligent be a mere transcriber of platitudes? It seemed impossible. Perhaps he was just paying out the rope, “giving” her an interview like a final cigarette at dawn, while behind her back he marshalled his facts into an efficient, deadly squad …

      Her head was sinking towards her desk. She reached for the lamp switch and slumped, with a dry splash, onto the newspaper. She closed her eyes and immediately began to dream. In the dream, Joseph Feig was her father. He was interviewing her. He smiled as she spoke of her triumphs, the delicious aftertaste of lies that people fell for, the escape from airless India. In his eyes she read a sad, shared awareness of the world’s credulity. “You’re a scrappy girl,” he said. She leaned over her desk and nestled her head in the crook of her elbow, thinking: scrappy girl. Then she heard her interviewer tiptoe around behind her chair. She reached around to feel his leg, but her hands swung through empty air. His bristly face pushed aside her hair and brushed her neck. His tongue fell out of his mouth. Heavy, warm, doughlike, it lay against her skin.

      She woke up with a shudder.

      Jammu’s father had been killed in 1974 when a helicopter carrying foreign journalists and some South Vietnamese military personnel was downed near the Cambodian border by a communist rocket. A second helicopter captured the crash on film before escaping to Saigon. Jammu and her mother had learned the news from the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune, their sole link with the man. It was from a week-old Herald Tribune that Jammu, more than a decade earlier, had first learned his name. Ever since she’d been old enough to ask, her mother had evaded her questions, dismissing the subject brusquely whenever Jammu tried to bring it up. Then, in the spring before she entered the university, her mother spoke. They were at the breakfast table on the veranda, Maman with her Herald Tribune and Jammu with her algebra book. Her mother nudged the paper across the table and scraped a long fingernail across an article at the bottom of the front page:

      TENSION MOUNTS ON

      SINO-INDIAN BORDER Peter B. Clancy

      Jammu read a few paragraphs, but she didn’t know why. She looked up for an explanation.

      “That’s your father.”

      The tone was typically matter-of-fact. Maman spoke only English to Jammu, and spoke it with a perverse disdain, as if she didn’t accept the language’s word for anything. Jammu scanned the article again. Countercharges. Secessionist. Bleak vistas. Peter B. Clancy. “A reporter?” she said.

      “Mm.”

      Her mother wouldn’t say what he was like. Having acknowledged his existence, she proceeded to ridicule her daughter’s curiosity. There was no story to tell, she said. They’d met in Kashmir. They’d left the country and spent two years in Los Angeles, where Clancy took a degree of some sort. Then Maman had returned, alone, to Bombay, not Srinagar, with her baby, and had lived there ever since. Nowhere in this obituary narrative did she suggest that Clancy was anything more than a second set of luggage. Jammu got the idea—things hadn’t worked out. It didn’t matter, either. The city was full of bastards, and Maman, in any case, was oblivious to public opinion. The newspapers called her the “laughing jackal of real estate.” Laughing all the way to the bank, they meant. She was a speculator and slumlord, one of the more successful in a town of speculation and slums.

      Jammu selected two Tylenols and a Dexedrine from her top drawer and swallowed them with coffee dregs. She’d finished the night’s reading sooner than she’d planned. It was only 6:30. In Bombay it was 5:00 in the evening—Indian time was a quaint half hour out of step with the rest of the world—and Maman was probably at home, upstairs, pouring her first drink. Jammu reached for the phone, got the international operator, and gave her the numbers.

      The connection hissed with the difficult spanning of half a world. Of course in India even local calls hissed this way. Maman answered.

      “It’s me,” Jammu said.

      “Oh, hello.”

      “Hello. Are there any messages?”

      “No. The town seems empty without your friends.” Her mother laughed. “Homesick?”

      “Not especially.”

      “Apropos—has the Enlightened Despot called you?”

      “Ha ha.”

      “Seriously. She’s in New York. The U.N. General Session opened.”

      “That’s a thousand miles from here.”

      “Oh, she could afford to call. She chooses not to. Yes. She simply chooses not to. I read this morning—do you still read the papers?”

      “When I have time.”

      “That’s right. When you have time. I read about her mini-summit with American intellectuals is what I was going to say. Front page, column one. Asimov, Sagan—futurists. She’s a wonder. Study her and you can learn. Not that she’s infallible. I noticed Asimov was eating ribs in the picture they ran. But anyway – How is St. Louis?”

      “Temperate. Very dry.”

      “And you with your sinuses. How is Singh?”

      “Singh is Singh. I’m expecting him any minute.”

      “Just don’t let him handle your accounts.”

      “He’s handling my accounts.”

      “Willful child. I’ll have to send Bhandari over later this month to check the arrangements. Singh is not—”

      “Here? You’re sending Karam here?”

      “Only for a few days. Expect